The Tedium Lies is available at Amazon in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle formats.
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The Tedium Lies began two years ago in an effort to establish my own epistemology regarding what I consider to be the four major subjects coupling metaphysics and philosophy. Owing to my own obscure record, the result of these reflections remains confessional in a form closest to prose poetry with a pessimistic anthropological bent.
Eventually abandoning a few years’ journalling and juvenilia written and warped in late adolescence, my prior method of writing had been conceived primarily within the stagnant bounds of consecutive journal entries, now and then smuggling out what I thought to refine elsewhere for failing projects, though these short-lived exchanges remained of little productivity until I started officially working on the manuscript of the Tedium in isolation at the age of twenty-two, unburdened by the major bulk of early disqualifications no longer worth appraising.
Unable to keep from assigning the relevance of my ideas into loosely sequential form under totemic chapters between the two books, by and by the Tedium sufficed to expose the direct substance for which I had previously only naïve impressions of how an author adorns a stylised narrative or poem with a few thematic measures and digressive embellishments woven into literary texture as an aside unto their own erudition, their own raw authorship.
Not a week would go by over its writing period without the incremental productivity of steadfast insomnia shepherding these temperamental daydreams. Nursing when possible the peace to think in sentences during the manual workday, covertly jotting down additions and aphorisms on my knee in a makeshift booklet of improperly stapled bits of scrap paper to later transcribe and unfurl at my desk past midnight.
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| One of several miniature notebooks. An early draft of chapter VIII in Religion. |
The closest works in scope and profile of which I am inclined to liken the shared foothold of the Tedium, indeed the most sincere precursors for its directive (beyond esoterica, myth, philosophy, and folklore), I have long honoured to the arcane treasuries of Robert Burton, E. M. Cioran, and Fernando Pessoa, as well as late studies into the two foundational texts of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching and the Zhuangzi.
The funny thing is, I would be frankly uneasy to evince these few sprinkled surnames as tinder for my writing of the Tedium since, as I also presume it not too dissimilar for them, the process was largely—fundamentally uninhibited to any extraneous form or style whatsoever.
Nearly all reception prior to publication would deem the Tedium an explicitly mystifying read, at times impenetrably purple or apishly baroque, “enigmatic to the point of being incomprehensible”, the detritus of theological redundancy, “like a five hundred year old monk armed with a dictionary”, perennialistically dense, overly polemicised, generally dispossessive, a groaning credos buoying misanthropic angst over inexpiable nihilism, “affirmatively degenerate & obtuse”, a coy nod in the vicinity of something “certainly unique”, yet another vague cold call from guttered straits, a suicide note, or else the sure result of impending madness.
For too long I hoped that there might be someplace I could contribute my work, to propose its addition in solidarity among a niche small press, welcomed by likeminded artists and readers. But even had I stumbled upon such a willing publisher, doubtless the Tedium would be catalogued among its antitheses.
To this end, the ideal reader is one whom we may bargain with both ways for confession and explanation.
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